Friday, December 24, 2004

Are quite well described in this BBC item on the end of the United Nations "Decade For Indigenous People".

"Their land has been taken away, their sustainable use of land dismissed, and their cultures have been denigrated"

"There is a sense of hopelessness about the ability to control our own destiny that leads to social ills so common in indigenous communities, such as alcoholism, drug abuse, and domestic violence"

"They get disconnected from their communities and the environment and many eventually get completely detached from their own indigenous identity"

Indeed. And anyone who isn't detatched is a Nazi.

Merry Christmas ! Blogging will be light to non-existent as I shuttle between London, Old Trafford (treat for the kids, not for me - give me the Victoria Ground any day) and Swansea. Back on New Year's Eve.

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS - Gunmen riddled a Honduran bus with bullets, killing 23 passengers and wounding 16 others in what they called a protest against plans to reintroduce the death penalty.

A police spokesman, Deputy Commissioner Wilmer Torres, the gunmen left a note saying they represented a revolutionary group that opposes plans to reintroduce the death penalty for serious crimes in the country.

The message also threatened politicians who have spoken out against organized crime, including President Maduro.

Thursday, December 23, 2004

In 2003, Wales became the first constituent country of the United Kingdom where more than half of births (50.3 per cent) were outside marriage. Northern Ireland had the lowest proportion of births outside marriage (34.4 per cent), while in the United Kingdom as a whole 41.5 per cent of births were outside marriage.

The area of England with the lowest bastardy rate ? Swinging London (34.5%), where the large Asian and African (though not Caribbean) immigrant communities frown on illegitimacy. And the highest rate in England ? The hideously white North-East at 53.5%.

The graph on page 73 shows illegitimacy, after falling in the late 60s and early 70s (probably due to the advent of the contraceptive pill) rocketing in the Thatcher years, doubling between about 1983-1988. By the mid-1980s the working class were increasingly fragmenting, the underclass was burgeoning, and the song which reflected the traditional working class view of bastardy ceased to be heard on the football terraces of England.

"30somethings lead a baby boom" trumpeted the Times last week, in an upbeat piece celebrating a 4.3% rise in the number of babies born in England and Wales in 2003. At last, a change in the profile of our ageing population ! Maybe we won't have to work till we drop to pay all those index-linked public sector pensions.

But the really important information was half way down the item.

The figures, published yesterday by the Office for National Statistics, show that the proportion of older mothers would be even higher if not for growing numbers of births to immigrants, who tend to start their families much younger. Births to mothers born outside the UK accounted for nearly a fifth of all births in 2003, more than 50 per cent higher than the proportion ten years earlier. The increase was due entirely to a rise in births among immigrant women aged under 35.

Think about it. In England, one baby in 5 (19.2%) born last year was born to a mother who was not herself born in the United Kingdom. When you consider the number of second and third-generation immigrants (from whatever country) living here, forecasts that the Native Brits will be a minority by the end of the century start to look conservative.

In London, according to the Independent newspaper, 43% of all school children are non-white (note - it's not skin colour but culture which is important - so immigration from Albania, for example, is probably more problematic than immigration from India, a country with which we have many shared cultural links). Given recent large-scale immigration from Eastern Europe, Native British schoolchildren are almost certainly already a minority in London schools.

47.3% of 2003 births in London were to mothers born outside the UK (p74). The NUT will soon have a new minority to worry about.

Way back in the early Eighties when Mrs Thatcher talked about being 'swamped by people of a different culture', she was attacked on the grounds that the number of immigrants was a tiny percentage of the UK population. Nowadays the tone has changed from 'we're a tiny minority' to 'there are a lot of us, so you'd better take us into account'. I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to say - I merely illustrate how the terms of the debate have changed.

There is a politically honourable (though IMHO practically idiotic) position on immigration - namely that any attempt to restrict it is inherently racist, and that anyone who can afford the fare is entitled to live here. For those who take this view, the numbers are irrelevant, although strangely the same rules don't seem to apply, for example, to Jews living in the West Bank.

This may be the view of Her Majesty's Government. But if so they're remarkably shy about articulating it.

Others continue to worry at the numbers. There's a real split on the left between the 'figures are overstated' response (which implies that were they true or understated there WOULD be something to worry about) and the 'it doesn't matter what the figures are' response.

David Aaronovitch criticises the "melange of questionable statistics, assertions dressed as facts and straightforward scapegoating cranked out by Migration Watch UK and its main scribbler, Anthony Browne", and attacks the 'lies, damned lies' of the anti-immigration lobby. Yet when you read the pieces, he doesn't actually rebut anything, presenting the arguments of Migrationwatch as if they are self-evidently incorrect.

The vast majority of BNP candidates will be in Labour constituencies, an indication of where the fascists’ support is beginning to emerge and solidify. Searchlight has long argued that traditional Conservative voters have been the first to switch to the BNP in local elections, largely as a means to keep Labour out or as an anti-Asian protest, but this vote is soft and returns to the Conservative Party or goes elsewhere in national elections. The BNP support among traditional Labour voters is firmer and is an indication that sections of the working class are breaking with their traditional loyalties. These voters tend to be less embarrassed by the overt racism of the BNP while finding its anti-capitalist rhetoric appealing. It is also clear that many BNP voters, especially the young, have never voted for another party in their lives or have not done so for many years.

I have argued before that New Labour, and the UK left in general, having given up on Clause Four, is implementing the agenda of the 1970s student union, the politics of race, gender, sexuality - none of which have great appeal for the remnants of the British working class.

The coming change in the makeup of the English population is unprecedented. As the Observer said, "It would be the first time in history that a major indigenous population has voluntarily become a minority, rather than through war, famine or disease." I feel that though we may be able to avoid war, famine and disease, the chances of British politics splitting on racial lines are very high, with perhaps Fiji as a model for the future. The only real question is at what percentage level of non-Native Brit population the change to racial politics will occur. Given the large birthrate differentials between immigrants and Native Brits, it's quite possible that it will occur well beyond the point at which political action will be able to prevent minority status occurring. After all, 20% of the new voters in 2021, and half the new voters in London, will have mothers born abroad, and nothing can change that.

So arresting BNP members, Guardian exposes, BBC undercover documentaries, forced multiculturalism in schools are in the long term ineffective. Unless some kind of leftist police state comes into being.

Interesting times for my children. Where's that New Zealand Consulate phone number again ?

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Militant Moderate - who, along with three quarters of the blogging world, isn't impressed with the Tory stand (or lack of) on ID cards.

Mugged By Reality - does exactly what it says on the tin. Good stuff if you don't mind a fair sprinkling of clubbing/party reminiscence. Which I don't. Mind you, as an old man I'd say this was well out of order. But confession purges the soul and after repentance comes salvation ...

"I wonder how often Martin Flanagan saw Robert Louis Stevenson bounding in from the Kirkstall Lane End."

Lastly - it's not a new blog, but for all round coverage of the Scottish Regiments disaster and a lot of other things, Cabarfeadh is your one-stop blogging shop. Lots of good stuff, not all on military matters.

More parochially, among the casualties of Hoon's Howler are the Glorious Glosters, the regiment of this man.

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Difficult to find the time for major posts, what with wrapping, shopping and the odd party - but what need when you can sit back and see people saying just the things you'd want to say, given time, knowledge and writing ability.

Tim Worstall brilliantly takes apart the caring Dutch, who now deliberately kill 4-5,000 old or sick people in their hospitals each year, quite apart from the babies. From 'post-natal abortion', through the killing of the old, to the UK where you must provide ramps for the disabled but can kill a baby for a cleft palate, he hits every target.

Euthanasia has been practised for 10 years in the Netherlands, the first country in the world to legalise the practice, and now accounts for 4-5,000 deaths a year, 3.5% of the national death rate.

Huh? This ever so rare proceedure, one to be used only in extremis, in the most difficult cases, now means that for the poor benighted Dutch they have a 1 in 30 chance of being murdered in their sick beds? This is an advance in civilisation in exactly what manner? With these numbers would you want to be placed in an old people’s ward in that country? It is of course absolute proof that there is no validity to the slippery slope argument, no, none at all.

The practice is severely circumscribed and tightly regulated.

I believe this is known as gallows humour.

Melanie Phillips takes apart the Law Lords judgement on the Belmarsh 'detainees' (who are of course free to leave the UK at any time), focusing particularly on the bizarre theory that the law cannot discriminate between UK and foreign nationals - I believe we still have, for example, residence and immigration laws which (in theory at any rate) explicitly discriminate, and on Lord Hoffman's apparent ability, in his own eyes at least, to judge terrorist threats better than the elected Home Secretary.

And I urge anyone with an interest in the UK Criminal Justice system to read Norman Dennis at the Civitas blog, currently posting up a storm on Blunkett, the myth of "falling crime", and the claim that Jack Straw had left the Home Office "in a mess".

In the first eleven months of 2004, the year of Mr Blunkett's departure, with December's figure of about 2,500 still to be added in, there have been 33,673 personal-property robberies in London--with December included, not fewer than 36,000 for the full year.

Thus Mr Blunkett has not succeeded in getting the figures back even to the 35,709 personal-property robberies of 2000. Mr Blunkett was all the further, of course, from getting back to the figure with which Mr Straw began, the 27,000 of 1997, which included business robberies as well.

Robberies of personal property in London is a good figure to take. The Home Office is directly responsible for London's policing. There's been no significant change in how it robbery is defined. The category of "robberies" has hardly affected by changes in recording practices by the police. The British Crime Survey has too few cases of robbery for it to be of much use, so the Home Office uses the police figures. The figures are right up to date, so officials and ministers cannot claim that things have (unprovably) improved since the figures were collected

For all these reasons, the usual slipping and sliding between one set of figures and another is not possible here.

On the assumption that the December 2004 figure will be very low at 2,500, robberies in London would have fallen from 48,000 in 2001 to 36,000 in 2004.

But as late as 1990 there weren't as many as 36,000 robberies in the whole of England and Wales!

Taking the generous and hopeful estimate I suggested above--that the figure for London for December 2004 might be only 2,500--as late as 1961 there weren't as many as 2,500 robberies a year in the whole of England and Wales.

In the year David Blunkett became Home Secretary, 2001, there were 5,900 robberies in Lambeth alone. The national figure for robberies did not exceed 5,900 until 1969.

It is scarcely an occasion for popular celebration when the figure for Lambeth alone in the first 11 months of this year is 2,419. For this is more than the national figure of robberies for the full twelve months of 1961, 2,349, just before the cultural revolution began to shower its blessings upon us.

No the wonder people "fear" that crime is growing. People would have had to be extremely stupid not to come to fear crime. The stupid thing is to say that the fear of crime is "as much the problem" as crime itself.

Children are no longer badly behaved - now they 'suffer' from "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which causes (my italics) hyperactivity in children."

The other dream of the children's liberation lobby ? Well, children should have all the rights of adults. Work it out for yourself. Hint - there may be a motive involved. The children's liberation lobby (NCH, Barnados, NSPCC, who support policies which would horrify their founders, such as the lowering of the age of consent for homosexual acts to 16 and the abolition of Section 28) are also the people who are most excercised by internet child pornography. Projection, anyone ?

Sunday, December 19, 2004

Violence seems in this case to work quite well. It'll be interesting to see how this one pans out. Will we see Harold Pinter and co lining up to defend free expression against the 'religious right' ? Will the Guardian and U75 talkboards resound with condemnation of the protesters ? Don't hold your breath.

I'm presuming that no-one in Birmingham is planning to dramatise this story in the near future.